Time Is A Treasure Stored In A Book Of Memories

On my last visit to the home where I grew up, I was searching in my old bedroom for books my own children might like when I unearthed a priceless relic.

It was a collection of children's stories. They were lovely tales, but the true value of the book lay in the inscription.

Inside the cover, once upon a time, my mother had addressed the gift to me: "To Barbara Louise Brotman," she wrote. "Seven years old! February 23, 1963."

In the moment it took to read it, the onetime 7-year-old was again that 7-year-old.

Surely only moments had passed since I was the pigtailed, gap-toothed recipient of the overwhelming maternal joy that leaped out from that eloquent exclamation point.

It was only yesterday; it was 32 years ago; it was that day in my old bedroom, when my own daughter was almost 7 years old and the one who was brimming with maternal joy was I.

In the years since my children were born, time has turned quirky. With a sound or smell, the past rushes to the present, and a lost piece of my own childhood is found.

The clink of a spoon against a baby food jar brings back half-formed memory, and I suddenly recall the hollow echo of my mother's spoon against my metal baby dish, filled with water to keep the food warm.

Running alongside my daughter wobbling on her new two-wheeler, I can see my father running alongside me as I wobble along on mine, more than three decades ago.

If I go backward in time, I also go forward. A few weeks ago, I caught a glimpse of my 6-year-old playing dressup in my spaghetti-strapped velvet dress, looking out the window, her head tilted sideways in thought, her dark hair swept up, her neck as long and graceful as a swan's.

It was my daughter as she will someday be, contemplative before her prom or maybe even her wedding. I watched in reluctant wonder; I want her to be that young woman someday, but not yet.

There are many things I don't want to happen yet. Time has become an enemy as well as an imp, pulling me forward no matter how much I wish I could drag my feet.

We have put away the baby monitor, sold the potty seat and taken the baby seat off the bicycle. Baby fat has melted away. My older daughter has mastered sarcasm.

For my children, of course, all this can't happen fast enough. "I can't wait to be older," my older daughter often says. "I can't wait to be a grownup."

I, on the other hand, can. When it comes to the passage of time, my interests diverge from my children's.

In fact, when my children reached the ages of 4 and 6, it occurred to me that this would be a very nice place to stop time. They were toilet trained, cute and still liked being with their parents. Life seemed about as good as it can get; recalling vividly my own adolescence, I figured that it could get much, much worse.

Nice place or not, there was no stopping time. But on a birthday more than three decades ago, my mother captured it and preserved it between the pages of the book.

Along with the past, she had left plenty of room for the future, right underneath her inscription.

The former 7-year-old brought the book home. And at the end of my own daughter's seventh birthday, as she lay in bed in the quiet of her first night as a 7-year-old, I gave it to her.

Below my mother's words, I added mine. I inscribed it to my daughter -- "Seven years old! October 1, 1995" -- with the same exclamation point and the same overwhelming joy, in a different time.